Rants and raves about the mess of higher education in the United States.

Wednesday, May 10, 2017

Beating the AP Class Scam

By Professor Doom

With college
tuition perpetually increasing, parents are highly motivated to cut costs. One
way to cut costs is to enroll kids into “AP courses” in high school. Advanced
Placement courses provide college credit, at least if the students can pass the
AP exam…and there’s the rub, as that test costs around $100 to take.

Because there’s a
huge demand, high schools are greatly expanding AP enrollment. Hey, it looks
good to say half the kids in the school are taking AP courses, right? Of course
it does. However, it used to be that getting into an AP course required some
demonstration by the student that he was interested (tough to get from a
teenager) or talented enough to survive the more rigorous coursework.

Scarsdale High School is a place where 70 percent of the 1,500 students
take an A.P. course...

It used to
be that AP courses were the rare courses. I went to a double session high
school, for example, with thousands of students at the school. I didn’t take
any AP math classes (I was a slow starter, assuming I ever did start), but I
did take the (only ) AP English class the school offered (the valedictorian and all
the other top students were in that one class). We’ve gone from 30 students out
of 3,000, to 1,000 out of 1,500.

Do the teachers
think the “new and expanded” AP offerings are a good idea? Of course not:

The teachers of
the courses know what they’re doing is wrong, but much like in higher ed,
educators have very little influence on education today. With the flood of
incoming students, they responded the same way we have in high ed: reduce the
standards so you don’t end up failing just about everyone.

What happens, of
course, is a bunch of students enroll in the AP courses, a bunch of teachers
reduce the content of those courses, and then a bunch of students take the AP
exams, which are based not on what the teacher did, but on what the College
Board says should be in a college course.

Hmm, this is a
$100 test, and only 1 student in 8 passes the test…so, mathematically, if the
college you intend to go to charges less than $800 for a course, you’re better
off not taking the test. Hold the idea of “take the course, not the test” in
your head a bit, we’ll come back to it.

Now, the College
Board has beensoftening up the tests in
recent years, so passing rates are going up, but bottom line we have loads of
students taking these courses, and it’s very clear many of them don’t even have
a remote chance of succeeding.

So, is the “AP
Course” ideaa scam? Well, it depends on
how you use it, though some people believe as much:

--another
fake news site, so I’ll have to clarify this quote a bit. The College Board
also runs other college-related tests, like the SAT.

To clarify, the
College Board gets its money from the tests. $100 a pop for a test that, once
you’ve paid a professor a few hundred bucks to make, costs nothing to print,
and very little to grade (if that much, much of these tests are
fill-in-the-bubble tests taking under a second to grade).

$100 is rather
pricey considering the overhead here. As is so often the case, the high price
is because government is involved:

The above
“subsidy” only covers 28,000 tests—that could easily be less than 10,000 students,
since many students take 3, 4, possibly even 5 AP exams. The criticism of “AP
courses” as a scam has a fatal flaw:

The AP
program imposes "substantial opportunity costs" on non-AP students in the form of what a school gives up in order
to offer AP courses, which often enjoy smaller class sizes and some of the
better teachers. Schools have to increase the sizes of their non-AP classes,
shift strong teachers away from non-AP classes, and do away with non-AP course
offerings, such as "honors" courses. These opportunity costs are real
in every school, but they're of special concern in low-income school districts.

And? I mean,
seriously, you’re a parent, you want your kid to have the best education
possible despite 90% of the money you spend on it being sucked up into a
grotesquely huge and overpaid bureaucracy. Small class sizes? Better teachers?

Yes, you want
those things. AP Courses are not a scam, it is perfectly rational for parents
to get their kids into such courses if at all possible.

Even if these
courses are watered down…you’re still getting a better deal than if your kid
was in a non-AP course (it’s the same price either way, after all).

But the AP test? No,
don’t do that to your kids. You’re not saving any money here, even if your student passes the test.

Allow me to
explain what happens, at least from a math professor’s viewpoint (and, I
promise you, I saw this with my own eyeballs, many times). The good student
takes the AP Calculus course, for example, and passes the test. Great, he’s got
college credit for Calculus 1, right? He’s just saved tuition on one course,
based on a watered down test from a watered down course. In theory, he’s ready
for the next course.

Then he enrolls
in Calculus 2….and fails, most likely because AP doesn’t mean what it says it
means. I saw it time and again. It’s not a sure thing, mind you, but what goes
on in the next course varies wildly from campus to campus. AP courses and tests
change every year…but university courses don’t. There’s room for some huge, and
I do mean huge, gaps in preparation here, and I emphasize I’ve seen it with my
own eyes many times.

The bulk of the
students that take Calculus 2 on a campus after taking Calculus 1 on that same
campus? They do well. The bulk of the students that “AP” into Calculus 2? They
fail. They’re not prepared, at least not in the same way for the same course
that the “normal” students are.

The
high-school AP course didn't begin to hold a candle to any of my college
courses. My colleagues said the same was true in their subjects.

This is what
happened to me, incidentally, as I went from a “weak math student” in high
school, to blowing away my “more advanced” students in college. I started a
semester behind because I didn’t even take AP courses…but I passed my “AP
Calculus” friends from high school in the third semester, as they were forced
to retake the course or change their majors as they hit brick walls that only
existed because the calculus they took in high school wasn’t remotely
comparable to the calculus of college…they learned enough to pass the AP exam,
and that’s all.

I promise you,
there are better paths to success for most kids coming out of high school than
going straight to college. That said, you still want your kids in the AP
courses because they get smaller classes and better teachers.

Anyway, that’s
the trick to avoiding the AP scam: take the AP courses, don’t take the AP
tests. The student ends up being better prepared for college this way. Taking
the test not only is expensive, but if the student passes, he’ll lose most of
the benefits of that “advanced” preparation by having to retake courses.

One more detail:

Many
critics lay the blame on the College Board itself, a huge
"non-profit" organization that operates like a big business. The
College Board earns over half of all its revenues from its Advanced Placement
program -- more than all its other revenue streams (SATs, SAT subject tests,
PSATs) combined. The College Board's profits for 2009, the most recent year for
which records were available, were 8.6 percent of revenue, which would be
respectable even for a for-profit corporation.

This whole
“incredibly profitable non-profit corporation” thing is getting big in higher
education. I glanced at a little at this when I looked at the college
debt hall of shame, and I’ll look at how this scam works later…just so many
scams in higher education it’s tough to stay on top of all of them.